


feel the spine of your body and its bones

by Anonymous



Category: D.Gray-man
Genre: Aged-Up Character(s), Explicit Consent, Inspired by Poetry, Love, Multi, Sex, Snapshots, Trans Female Character, Trans Lady Allen Walker, really resolved sexual tension
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-08-31
Updated: 2017-08-31
Packaged: 2018-12-22 00:40:09
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,018
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11956086
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: Moments in the times of four people, all of who are in love.





	1. i like my body when it is with your body

**Author's Note:**

> Welcome to D. Gray-Man fanfic, where everything's made up and the timelines don't matter!
> 
> This is an AU where everyone is nineteen. No one knows about Kanda's tragic backstory yet, Allen is a trans lady, the sequence of canon will probably jump around a bit, and there are too many semi-colons. Title is (natch) from a poem by e. e. cummings. There are some warnings in further chapters which will be marked.  
> Thank you.

An outside observer might have expected them to pair off and then meet in the middle, but instead, Allen and Lenalee and Lavi had just kind of fallen into step with each other at the same time. They were never sure how much the Finders, other Exorcists, and even staff at Headquarters knew-- they didn’t talk much about it to others because of the war, and all, not even to mention the influence of certain over-protective family members, and the very real harm gossip could do. But the three of them didn’t shy away from the fact that they were in love.  
  
Kanda was a different situation. All three of them could feel his gazes at them when he thought they weren’t looking, and it wasn’t a surprise that in the couple of nights they’d stayed in Allen’s room in the first Headquarters, Kanda’s hearing would be able to catch their giggles and moans through the doors. All the Exorcists lived pretty closely together, in that place, and Allen and Kanda had been just down the hall from each other.

They all knew he knew, and he must have realized that they knew, but none of them hurried to do anything about it. Kanda for his own reasons, presumably.  Lenalee vetoed inviting him outright; she remembered, privately, how sensitive Kanda was to topics of romance, and she didn’t want to make him uncomfortable. Lavi and Allen both assumed that she just didn’t want to ask him herself because—well, it was Lenalee. Kanda was on record as not being able to refuse her anything she really wanted. None of them wanted him to say yes just because of some sense of duty.

  
In the end it was Allen who’d approached him. All of them had been in her room again, making out almost frenziedly after a battle full of near misses. The atmosphere in the room had been heavy. Panic and sorrow could do that to people, and Allen knew to take comfort where she could find it. Which is why she’d pulled back from her partners’ touches, panting, “Wait, wait.”  
After a murmured explanation and promise to return, she’d slid out of the bed and re-buttoned her pants, then quickly slipped out the door.  
She was still flushed and her hair was almost entirely free of its tie, and with her state of relative undress (she was only wearing her under-shirt and pants), anyone looking at her would immediately know what had just happened. She didn’t care, though. She was positive Kanda already knew. It was late, but she was reasonably sure he was still awake.

Sure enough on both accounts, he answered his door after only one sharp knock. His expression was shuttered and there was a light red tint on his face as he looked down at her. “What?”  
“Look,” Allen said. “Look, if you don’t want to—or if you can’t for some reason, for any reason, or if you change your mind—I swear on my life we won’t push.”  
  
Kanda stared at her incredulously for a moment and then stepped backwards into his room, leaving space for Allen to follow him.  
Unsure, but unafraid, Allen did.  
Kanda closed the door behind both of them and turned to Allen, spending a second more staring at her. “If I change my _mind,_ ” he said finally.  
Allen shrugged, not breaking what was now effectively a staring contest. “You’ve obviously been hesitant,” she said. “None of us—me, Lavi, Lena—none of us know why.  So, like I said, if you—”  
“It’s not that--” Kanda bit out, “It’s not that I don’t want to.” He grimaced and looked sideways, studying the wall of his room like it held the answer to life’s secrets.  
It was just a stone wall. Allen looked around the room a little, curious now; she’d never actually been in Kanda’s room before. It was as no-nonsense as the man himself. Besides the Order-provided bed and dresser, the only hints towards decoration was a floor-to-ceiling stained glass window in the far wall, and a pretty flower in a jar on the nightstand. Allen stared at it, wondering.  
“It’s complicated,” Kanda said finally, drawing Allen’s eyes back to him. He was still grimacing but now seemed to be studying his slippers. When he looked up and met her gaze again, his face had gotten redder.

“Kanda…” She didn’t know what else to say.

  
There was another beat of silence, and then Kanda exhaled like the air in his lungs had personally offended him. He stepped towards her and, gingerly, held her face in his hands. “God knows I haven’t gotten anywhere by ignoring you idiots,” he mumbled.  
Allen’s eyebrows shot up in surprise. “Kanda?”  
“I know my name already,” he grumped. “I… I’m saying yes.”  
“The others—”  
“I know, Walker. I’m saying yes.”  
“Oh,” Allen said. It took a minute to settle in, and then she smiled, pleased. “I’m really glad,” she said softly.  
The man just shook his head like he couldn't believe it, and then leaned in to kiss her. She leaned up to meet him.

  
Allen left Kanda’s room shortly afterwards and then returned with Lavi and Lenalee, who had both also put their clothes back on so they were some semblance of decent. They all sat on Kanda’s narrow bed together, side by side (by side by side).  
Shy was not an adjective that fit Kanda Yuu, but he was clearly not ready for any of the activities that the three of them had previously been up to. That was fine. Instead, they just kissed for a while. Kanda was awkward at first, but Allen was delighted to find he warmed up quickly.  
It was enough just to be together.

 


	2. i like what it does / i like its hows

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> More or less an excuse for Bookman Junior vs. Lavi identity navel-gazing.

Out of the four of them, Lavi knew the most about the body, which meant he knew the most about sex. When you study medicine you study sex whether you address it specifically or not.  Bookman had never been shy about explaining the various spasming works of muscle and chemicals that made a human’s blood churn to his apprentice. Unsurprisingly, this had led to Lavi being absolutely uninterested in it for a long time before arriving at the Black Order. Absolutely nothing was less enticing then being dryly quizzed on the number of organs in the human reproductive systems.

 

Lavi knew the most about sex, but that didn’t mean he understood it the best. Out of the four of them, he’d say that Allen had that honour.  
Lenalee had been sheltered—first by force, and then by family. Lavi would never say that his fellow Exorcist was naïve, but with her childhood mostly spent confined to a room and her adolescent years closely monitored by her over-bearing brother, she just hadn’t had the time to realize questions and be curious as a growing young lady might have otherwise.  
Kanda, meanwhile, Lavi couldn’t quite figure out, but judging from the somewhat scandalized glances he gave people kissing in the streets before sharply turning away, Lavi would guess he didn’t have much experience either.  
Allen did. Being Cross’ apprentice she had had a very, very different kind of education than Lavi. Not at the General’s hands—thank God—but in a far more direct way than Lavi had gone through with his diagrams and lectures about the interlocking pelvic bones. He wondered, sometimes, if he would’ve preferred her way.  


 

… that was to say, not he as in Lavi, specifically. _Lavi_ didn’t wonder anything about Allen Walker’s late adolescence under Cross’ tutelage. He didn’t understand about muscle groups and sinew. Bookman Junior did.

 

  
No, what Lavi understood was very different. Three familiar voices moaning underneath (or above, or next to) him, and the sound that uniforms made sliding off shoulders in the dark. The taste of three pairs of lips. The scent of skin and musk, how he really could tell who was who with his eyes closed after a while. The way Lenalee always arced her whole body when she’d reached her peak, her eyes closed, like she was awash in the final notes of a song.  
The way Allen always tried to muffle her own sounds, with a hand or a pillow or someone else’s mouth, like she was nervous of being found out, and the sheer starlight-filled intensity of her smile afterwards.  
The way that Kanda was careful; so surprisingly, incongruously careful, and later he’d roll his eyes and smack at Lavi's head and act like nothing had ever happened, but when they were all bare and vulnerable with each other he never so much as outstretched a hand without murmuring a request, waiting for a yes. (Which he got, in spades.) And when they all disentangled and laid down properly to rest he would stretch his arms across as many of their body’s as he could reach, like he was trying to guard them even then, his breath harsh on their shoulders before it evened out in sleep.

So Lavi had had a practical education after all.

  
Bookman Junior couldn’t begrudge him it. Something about personas that he never quite grew out of, as it was impossible too, was that no matter what happened, it all still physically happened to him. This 49th version of himself knew that better than the previous ones had put together. But he’d been too young, before, to understand properly anyway.

  
Bookman Junior didn’t like to think of the other aspect of intimacy.  Of love, that was. Before being Lavi he had never had a particular education in that subject, as it was strictly forbidden by his mentor. He certainly wasn’t sharing the details of his knowledge about it with the old man _now_. 

  
As Lavi, he knew it well. Sex and love for Lavi were irreversibly tied together. He’d experienced (a significant amount of) the first because of the second, in reverse order. 

 

When he left his partners' company and let his Lavi mask fall away, as himself, he hoped desperately that he was the only one of the four young Exorcists who understood that you didn’t need love to have sex. That intimacy could be a cold bartering chip, or a weapon even. Behind what was supposed to be a cloak of indifference, he hoped none of Lavi’s most treasured people had had to learn that lesson.  
He knew that he was wrong. God willing none of them had learnt it firsthand, but they had all seen most of the same things Lavi had seen, if written out by different tragedies in different places. Lenalee, Allen, Kanda—they all understood how destructive both could be.  
They understood love was the more dangerous of the two. Love excused anything, in some people’s minds. Whenever Allen would risk her life and limb in an effort to save what she said was an akuma’s crying soul, afterwards, her and Kanda would get locked into a screaming match about love.

  
But it wasn’t only dangerous. Love kept Lenalee going—and Kanda too, Lavi suspected, although he wasn’t sure how. Love told Allen to keep walking and never, ever stop, and she would not, as long as she could move. With the three other Exorcists at his side, love surrounded Lavi wherever he went. His one-eyed view of the world was permanently coloured by it.

 

Bookman Junior wouldn’t have it any other way, now that it had been presented to him. He didn’t know how he’d be able to see another way when it was time for him to move on from the Order.  
Ink and paper, that was all they would become, and he himself would be nothing but dust.  
  
  
But, as he laid in the dark with them, Lavi's thumb had gently smoothed over Allen's cross-shaped Innocence scar. Lenalee's soft hair just barely tickling his face, and Kanda's arm a solid weight across his middle. Bookman Junior had stared at the ceiling of the room, and he'd wondered how much time it would take to let go. Lavi was not a person who relinquished precious things easily.

Neither, for that matter, were the other three.


End file.
